Keystone (8 page)

Our connection clears again and now the other feelings, from around the circle, start rushing through. Even without looking, I can tell who’s who as they come. Ms. Fisk comes first, picking her way along. She feels as comfortable as heartburn. Addo is next, as bulky and definite as a shovel full of dirt. I swear I can feel him becoming whole again, his wounds coming together and healing. It’s like tiny pieces of all of us rush toward him and cling to him, like quilt pieces we can spare, and it sews him back together. He fills up the connection so much that Brandon and Mark can’t squeeze past him, although they try. Once Addo passes through, Brandon bounces and Mark is a bottle rocket, only held on path by everyone else. Nok feels like everyone and everything- a smudged rainbow, a million blades of grass waving at once, a handful of snowflakes. Mr. Reese comes through like a clear moon, calm and strong. Mrs. Reese drifts through like sand between my fingers. Iris bubbles. Sean rolls through, complicated and even, and the last is Garrett.

His energy eases into me. He swirls into my muscles and I’m strong. It’s like he’s whispering through my skin and making me beautiful. I feel him move, as if my body is a room that he’s wandering through. He pauses to study pieces of me and I try to stand still inside myself and let him. It’s not easy. But then he’s in my mind, like a handsome mirage, and with a blink, he drifts from me the way moonlight filters from a room.

Then it’s my turn and I can hardly keep my energy from pushing toward him. I’m so excited to have him thrown open wide, to be able to move through him and feel the places too deep to ever touch with my body. I want to see everything inside him.

But before I have crossed from my threshold to his, there is a sudden surge from somewhere else. An energy I don’t recognize and didn’t expect comes gushing around the circle. It clumps when it hits me, like barrels of cold oatmeal, dirty gray and moldy green, the feeling of jealousy left to rot, anger drowned in a deep hole, sadness so large that it crushes me beneath it. It keeps coming and coming, piling up until my head pounds with it and I feel like it will burst me open.

And then I realize what this is.

It’s Roger.

I try to wrench my mouth shut to smother the hum. I don’t want Roger pouring through my veins. I don’t want to understand him. I squirm between my mother’s and Garrett’s fingers, jarring the circle.

The energy surges up from my mother’s side, the force of it like the tip of a cracked whip. She comes roaring back into me, her brilliance slamming against the sluggish ooze of my father. Garrett is right behind her. Roger’s energy loses its grip on me. My mother shoves him right out of my skin and Mark grunts as Roger pushes backward in the circle. The hum rises, higher and higher, and with a sudden pop, I’m back in the folding chair beside Garrett.

My head spins as I open my eyes. I almost expecting to see the brown sludge of Roger hanging off me or off Mark. But there is no ooze. No Roger.

Garrett asks, “Are you okay?”

I just nod. Mark dodges a glance at me, but all our eyes are drawn to Ms. Fisk. She bends over the card table, scribbling line after line. Her pen scratches so hard across the paper, it sounds like she’s engraving the table beneath her. Then she snaps her pen down and wobbles to her feet.

“Basil Marcus Reese,” she announces. “43, Bestowed the highest honor upon us all by using his life to preserve the human race and dying in the act of saving another human being.”

Addo rises from his seat as Ms. Fisk holds up the paper.

“I see you,” the Addo’s voice cracks and a solitary tear drops out of the corner of his eye. Ms. Fisk picks up a second sheet. She grunts and drops down hard onto her chair again.

“Charlotte?” Addo’s voice rises with concern, but Ms. Fisk picks up the pen and scribbles across the paper again. The sound is as frantic as an EKG needle. I realize this is not the way it’s supposed to go. Mrs. Reese is craning forward off her seat.

Garrett and I are leaning off our chairs too, until, out of nowhere, an invisible boot hammers me in the chest. I don’t really see it, but whatever it is knocks the air right out of me. As I fall back on my chair, gasping for breath, Garrett hits the back of his chair too. We look at one another, stunned and breathing hard. Addo steps toward Ms. Fisk as she throws down her pen and pushes herself back onto her feet.

“A message,” she whispers as if she just got pounded too. “Roger Earnest Maxwell, 42, refuses to be written…he has re-planed his energy, since he refuses to relinquish Walter Louis Fisher’s Memory. Evangeline also refuses to be written. She and Walter have chosen to break their connections and re-plane their energy, in order to pursue Roger in the different plains. They hope to bring him back to be written. God help them.”

I push myself back up in my seat. That’s what happened. I wasn’t kicked in the chest. That feeling was my mother leaving me, breaking her connection with me. Now I’m on my own completely, without any guidance…and Garrett too. There’s so much to understand, but Ms. Fisk goes pale, holding out the paper to the Addo.

“There is a message, Addo,” she says. “But it’s unintelligible. I’m sorry. The rest…it’s all symbols. I don’t understand it.”

Addo steps forward and skims the page. I stand up beside Garrett and the air trips around in my lungs. Addo’s gaze finally swings to meet mine. I don’t even feel my feet move, but I am suddenly standing beside the Addo.

“Can I see?” I ask and he hands me the paper as if that’s what’s supposed to happen. I take it between my fingertips, feeling the fibers of the wood grains and smelling the ink on it. I look down at the scrawl.

The writing is like one long word, but with strings of symbols that loop from one line to the next without any spaces or periods. The paper seems to pulse in my hands. The letter soup swims up; alphabet noodles stirred to the top. The letters pop in my face and disappear so quickly, I can’t make sense of them. I step backward, but the letters follow, exploding in front of my nose as if they’re chasing me.

I close my eyes, but when I open them again, the letters rise back up from the symbol shapes. I focus on them, letting them come this time, swirling until they stick together, connecting a letter at a time into words.

And whatever air is left in me evaporates.

The print is suddenly as familiar as my own skin.

It belongs to my mother.

And she has written over and over again the thing that only I would understand.

Find it Nalena Find it...

Mankind

Mankind

Mankind

Chapter 4

THE PAPER SLIPS FROM MY hand.

The famous double whammy,
Addo’s words form in my head. He studies my face and waits for my response.

My mother wants me to find my grandfather’s memory.
I tell him.

I figured as much.

You saw the words too?

No, no. There are Addos, there are trapeze artists, and there are Tralates. Stop looking so confused; you’ll blow our cover.
Addo says. He rubs his chin as if he’s trying to make sense of everything as he continues, only to me, inside my head.
Tralates are the folks who are linked to the afterlife, similar to the Alo. Kind of. Tralates receive messages from the universe when it’s uber necessary to have them, via vision, via the Earthly written word. So what that means is that when there are books or written papers lying around, if there’s something you need to know, the words are going to bring themselves to your attention. You should be doing cartwheels. Only some have the gift of translative vision.

How many?

That I’ve met in my lifetime? Uh...you.
Addo’s voice meanders around my brain, but he quirks his head to the side as Ms. Fisk asks me, “Did you see anything, Nalena?”

It takes me a minute to figure out what he wants me to say. I shake my head and say, “No.”

“Well,” Addo sounds almost delighted. “I’ll just have another look then.”

He makes a big show of bending over to pick up the paper and folding it in quarters. His voice pokes up inside my head.
Good girl. Most likely, the Vision is a result of your momentary checkout during re-Impressioning. Or the re-Impressioning itself. Who knows? But at any rate, being a Tralate is a special gift you should probably keep under your hat, capice?

Except for Garrett.
I add.

“Okay, Nalena,” Addo says, straightening up. It’s an answer, even though it doesn’t sound like it when he says it out loud. “Go ahead and grab a seat. I’ll let you know what this means after I take a better look, alright?”

In my head he adds,
And it looks to me that you have a choice to make.

I turn away from him as I send my answer:
No. I don’t.
But my voice says, “I don’t care what it says, if it’s about Roger.”

“If that’s what you prefer,” Addo says and then, only in my head,
You can always give Evangeline and Walter a shot at taking care of Roger on their own.

Every step back to my chair is a word.
No. I. Can’t.

This is a lot for your mother to ask of you, kiddo.
Addo’s voice frowns in my head.
And it’s not even likely that you’ll succeed.

I take my seat beside Garrett and he gives me an exhausted smile. Things start snapping together. Garrett said he’d talked to his connection about me. That ‘Wally’ had said I was a good bet, that he’d bet all his quarters on me. I don’t know how I’d missed it. My grandfather, Walter, was known for slipping quarters to every child he met. My grandfather’s been with Garrett all along, with me.

I don’t look back at the Addo as he settles onto his own chair. If I look, I’m afraid I’ll glare at him and give everything away. Garrett’s face is level and calm, as if nothing just happened to him either.

Of course I’ll succeed.
I send the thought to Addo, trying to sound as sure and capable as I need to feel.
Just because I don’t know what I’m doing yet…

“Dut dut dut,” Addo clicks his tongue to shut me up. Whatever expression is on my face, Ms. Fisk seems to be studying it, so I drop my eyes into my lap and pick at my fingernails instead. Addo turns to her, “Madam Fisk, is there anything else for us?”

What I mean is,
Addo continues to only me,
this isn’t an easy thing to do. In fact, this is quite a bugger of a thing to do. It’s not just that your grandfather passed away over seventeen years ago…

“There’s nothing more,” Ms. Fisk says.

Murdered.
I clear the growl from my throat with a cough. Addo acknowledges it with a tiny nod that could just as likely be answering Ms. Fisk as me, but then he continues in my head.

It’s not like we just noticed that Roger stole your grandfather’s Memory and then went about our business. We’ve been searching high and low and sideways, but Roger was quite aware of how important Walter’s Memory was to us. And it turns out, Roger hid the thing pretty darn good.

“Alrighty then,” Addo says out loud. “Let’s clear out the chairs and add another table. The Totus will be starting soon.”

I haven’t thought of my grandfather’s Memory as being special to anyone besides my mom and I, and the people in the community that actually knew him. It never really occurred to me that his Memory might be even bigger than that. Or that it could be significant for other reasons.

Addo, what’s so important about my grandfather’s Memory?

Addo stays put as the Reese boys get up and start moving the folding chairs to the outer edges of the room. I can tell Garrett feels the loss of my grandfather’s connection in his muscles, just like I feel the loss of my mother in mine. It’s not as exhausting as when I received my first connection, Grace, but my whole body aches like I have the flu. Garrett helps with the chairs, but he moves more slowly than usual. Sean lifts an eyebrow at his brother, but says nothing.

Addo rubs his healed fingers, as if it takes all his concentration, but his answer to my question fills up my head.
Your gramps studied The Fury all his life. He was as dedicated an Alo as your mother, and after he watched The Fury recruit and destroy his son-in-law, he was determined to stop them for good.

Mark and Brandon heft a table open, banging everything in their path as they do. I press myself flat against the wall as the Addo continues talking in my head.

Walter studied them tirelessly, searching for their weaknesses. And, in the minutes before his death, we believe he succeeded in figuring out their ultimate soft spot. The last Memories Walter recorded were those of key people that he had convinced to give up their goods on The Fury once they had passed. Walter agreed to grant them anonymity in life, in exchange for being the Alo that would record them when they passed. They agreed, since Walter was always a man of his word.